Technorati: Charting blogdom's rise

I spent nearly three hours tonight at Technorati's first Developers Salon at Technorati's HQ in a startup-friendly quarter of lower San Francisco. More familiar faces there than I expected. Among those on hand were founder David Sifry, Marc Canter and eweek columnist Steve Gillmor (pictured above), Doc Searls (who drove up from Santa Barbara for this), NewsMonster creator Kevin Burton, Mary Hodder, Xian Crumlish, Scott Rosenberg of Salon and Kevin Marks.

I created a quick photo gallery of the event here. About 55 people turned out, eight women and the rest men.

Spent most of the hour before the official presentation began chatting with Mary and Mitch Kapor, the millionaire entrepreneur, founder of the Lotus Development Corp., and current developer of a not-yet-released open-source personal-information manager. Kapor gave us some leads regarding an upcoming event that we'll be able to officially announce in a week or two.

Sifry -- a wonderful, inventive fellow whom I finally met in person -- began the presentation with several stunning slides about link traffic and comparisons between media sites and blogs. I'll see if I can turn out a quick article on this for OJR or another publication.

Sifry mentioned that Technorati started out on Thanksgiving weekend 2002 as an effort to find out "who was talking about me" in the blogosphere. Since then, it has begun charting an increasing number of blogs -- an average of:

- 3,000 a day in January 2003
- 4,000 a day by that March
- 6,000 a day by June 2003
- 8,000-9,000 new blogs a day by September 2003
- 10,000 at the end of 2003
- 11,000 to 12,000 new blogs a day today.

That's pretty incredible, and it adds up to 2.4 million total blogs that Technorati is monitoring. Not all are active. Of that number, about 45 percent have not been updated in the past three months. And he points out that 2.4 million blogs does not equate to 2.4 million bloggers, because many bloggers have multiple blogs.

Xian blogged the event here.

And Doc has posted photos of the event.